Consumer entertainment technologies are moving towards high resolution color displays for mobile entertainment. Increasingly, consumers want to take their entertainment with them. Cross-country travelers and cross-town commuters are eagerly pursuing gaming, music and video entertainment activities on mobile phones (smartphones), personal digital assistants (PDAs) and portable computers. At present, however, the entertainment experience is limited, even primitive, compared to what consumers have come to expect from their game consoles, home theaters and DVD-equipped computers.
The main problem is data storage. The fact is that sophisticated digital entertainment is data-intensive, and it is growing more so every day. Traditional small “form factor,” portable media such as CompactFlash® cards, SD® flash cards, Memory Stick™ and other solid state memory devices simply cannot deliver the capacity and price per megabyte required for a high-quality entertainment experience. Recording content onto solid state memory cards in high volume is expensive and impractical, and securing that content effectively is very difficult.
While some experts predict that broadband Internet access will deliver high-quality games and movies to mobile consumer electronics devices, there are significant barriers to success. Mobile phone networks are designed to transmit voice communications and are simply not efficient for high-capacity data transmission. Mobile phone connections are not capable of the required speeds and are notoriously unreliable, with frequent dead zones and dropped connections. While games are being delivered to mobile phones currently, the quality of game play and the game environment cannot begin to approach that of a console.
WiFi, or 802.11, wireless is designed for data transmission, and the growing number of WiFi hotspots looks attractive on the surface for delivering large amounts of data to mobile devices. Internet access and email application for multiple users are easily accommodated by WiFi. Nonetheless, managing streaming and interactive content such as multiplayer games and high-quality video or movies for thousands, if not millions, of users simultaneously will be challenging for any network. Security is also a problem for WiFi, leaving content providers open to potential piracy.
Moreover, the data storage problem would still exist. For any sort of networked delivery system to be viable, mobile consumer devices will have to embed significant amounts of storage to hold large, downloaded game and movie files, and to track a player's progress within the game. Perhaps the most significant problem for networked content delivery is cost. It has been estimated that it can cost more than $30 to send a DVD-quality film over the Internet.
Disc-based distribution costs are far lower. Even more compelling is the fact that consumers have consistently demonstrated their preference for purchasing high-value content on discs, as evidenced by the recent upswing in DVD sales. Moreover, optical discs are molded and can therefore be replicated at less expense than solid state memory devices.
In order for a disc drive to be useful in this context, it must be extremely small. It must also be capable withstanding extremely severe environmental and physical conditions. Small size, low power consumption, environmental endurance, low cost and light weight are characteristics that must coexist in this disc drive. They cannot be met by simple extensions of previous technology.
Clearly, therefore, the mobile entertainment industry needs an portable, small form factor, secure storage technology to meet the growing demand for a portable, high-quality entertainment experience. In addition, it is anticipated that a storage device capable of holding large amounts of data would find application in other areas, such as in portable computers used in connection with the homeland security effort.